University of Texas Purchases Reporters' Notes on Watergate

By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

Published: April 8, 2003

WASHINGTON, April 7—
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who first uncovered the Watergate scandal, have sold their Watergate notes and other papers to the University of Texas for $5 million, the university announced today.

The material will be cataloged and stored at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, a research library on the campus in Austin. Under the conditions of the sale, most of the material will become public within a year, but the identities of confidential sources will be kept secret until after the sources die, including the one known as ''Deep Throat,'' the university said.

As young reporters at The Post in 1972, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein were the first to make the connection between members of President Richard M. Nixon's White House and re-election campaign staffs and a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex.

Nixon's efforts to cover up the burglary led to a Congressional impeachment inquiry and eventually to his resignation.

The reporters wrote two books about the scandal, ''All the President's Men'' in 1974 and ''The Final Days'' in 1976.

In an interview today, Mr. Woodward, 60, said that he and Mr. Bernstein, 59, were ''getting on in years and these things were sitting in our own storage facilities, and we were afraid we would be gone someday and no one would know what to do with them.''

Mr. Woodward said they asked an agent to see if a place could be found where the material could be put together coherently and displayed properly with the assurance that the identities of sources would be protected. The University of Texas was the only place the agent approached, Mr. Woodward said.

He said lawyers for The Post had given the university a letter saying that the reporters and not the paper owned the material that was being bought. Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., publisher of the The Post, said, ''There are special historical circumstances here, and The Post signed off on their agreement.''

Mr. Woodward is now an assistant managing editor at The Post and the author of several other books. Mr. Bernstein lives in New York and is writing a book about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Ransom Center has a vast collection of literary and cultural treasures, and it paid handsomely for many of them. In 1986, for instance, the Center paid $15 million for rare books and manuscripts that had been collected by Carl H. Pforzheimer, a New York investment banker who died in 1957.

The center's collection ranges from the first book printed in English, a history of Troy dated 1473, to the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in ''Sunset Boulevard.'' Its holdings have been appraised at more than $1 billion.

The director of the center, Thomas F. Staley, said the Woodward and Bernstein papers were ''one of the great archives of American history.'' He said the money for the purchase was raised from private donors.

Mr. Woodward said that he and Mr. Bernstein had ''saved everything'' and that the material described ''a step by step, sometimes hour by hour account of what we were covering and what we were doing.''

The university estimated that there were 75 file-drawer-size boxes of material, including notes, transcripts and tapes of interviews, drafts of articles and memos the reporters wrote to each other.

The university said Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein had donated a total of $500,000 to the university to establish a series of conferences on Watergate.